Wong Jing facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Wong Jing
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Wong Jing in 2020.
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| Born |
Wong Yat Cheong (王日祥)
3 May 1955 |
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| Occupation |
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| Parent(s) | Wong Tin-Lam (1928–2010) | ||||||||||
| Awards | Hong Kong Film Critics Society Awards – Best Screenplay 2006 Colour of the Loyalty 2007 Crouching Tiger |
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Wong Yat-cheong, better known by his stage name as Wong Jing (Chinese: 王晶; pinyin: Wáng Jīng, born 3 May 1955) is a Hong Kong film director, producer, actor, presenter, and screenwriter. A prolific filmmaker with strong instincts for crowd-pleasing and publicity, Wong Jing played a prominent role in Hong Kong cinema during the 1990s.
Biography
Wong was born in Hong Kong, the son of noted film director Wong Tin-Lam. He graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong with a degree in Chinese literature which he describes as "useless" (Yang, 2003).
Like many Hong Kong film figures of his time, Wong began his career in television – in his case, scriptwriting for local juggernaut TVB beginning in 1975 (Teo, 1997). He moved on to writing for the Shaw Brothers studio. There, he made his directing debut with Challenge of the Gamesters (千王鬥千霸) in 1981. This start foreshadowed his later successes with movies about gambling, such as God of Gamblers, starring Chow Yun-fat and Andy Lau, which broke Hong Kong's all-time box office record upon its release in 1989, and started a fad for the genre.
Wong has directed, produced or written over 175 films (Yang, 2003), occasionally acting in them as well. He works with an efficient mass production method making heavy use of directing assistants and allowing him to work on several movies at once. He works under the umbrellas of two production companies he launched, Wong Jing's Workshop Ltd. and BoB and Partners Co. Ltd. (Best of the Best), the latter in partnership with director Andrew Lau and writer-producer Manfred Wong (Bordwell, 2000).
He once commented that his movies were hits because he gave the people what they wanted, and not what he thought they should want. A typical Wong production might be a broad comedy (Boys Are Easy, 1993) or an entry in a currently popular genre, such as martial arts (Holy Weapon, 1993), or gangster film (Young and Dangerous, 1996). It will imbue its model with lightning pacing and frequent shifts in tone to accommodate slapstick humor, sentimental heart-tugging, cartoonish violence, and parodic references to well-known Hong Kong and Hollywood films.
Wong also directed or produced several of the films of comic actor Stephen Chow, who has been Hong Kong's most popular performer since the early 1990s. Examples of their collaborations include God of Gamblers II (1991), Tricky Brains (1991), Royal Tramp I and II (1992) and Sixty Million Dollar Man (1995).
Wong's commercial skills are not limited to the content of his movies or his casting. He was using Hollywood-style cross-media promotional tactics – such as tie-in novels, comic books and other products, and magazine interviews – long before they became common in Hong Kong (Bordwell, 2000).
In the late 1990s and 2000s, Wong's films fared much worse in the box office compared to his earlier output due to the sluggish recession which had enveloped Hong Kong cinema in the new millennium. However a number of his films released in the 2010s, such as From Vegas to Macau, saw renewed success for the director, particularly in mainland China.
Filmography
